Introduction

Our data is downloaded from the website Kaggle, but the data originally came from Ted.com and looks at all the TEDTalks (which started in 1984) published on TED’s website as of September 21st, 2017. It contains data such as: the number of comments, a brief description, duration of the talk, where the event took place, the number of languages the talk is in, the film date, the main speaker’s name, the number of speakers, the publishing date, the ratings, the speaker occupation, the number views, and the name of the talk.

Our group is interested in this domain because Ted Talks have become a cultural icon in our time. Ted Talks cover a large range of topics and some are more widely viewed than others. We are curious to explore datasets of Ted Talks to determine if it will reveal information about society or the times we live in. It is also possible that we will not find anything that we can extrapolate to be a reflection of our society but rather will simply learn more about what people find interesting or entertaining and what they do not.

Summary Information

From Ted’s start to September 21st, 2017, there have been 2550 videos posted. Ken Robinson’s video Ken Robinson: Do schools kill creativity? has the most views of any video at 47227110 views. However, Hans Rosling hasrecorded more videos than any other individual at 9 videos. The most commented video was Richard Dawkins: Militant atheism receiving 6404 comments.

General Overview

There are a number of metrics that Ted Talks measure to gauge each talk’s success. Below is a table of the top ten Ted Talks based on view count. In the table you will find the date the talk was filmed, the title with a link to the talk, the speaker’s name, the tags associated with the talk, the number of languages that the talk is available in, the number of comments on the video and the number of views.

Date Title Speaker Tags Languages Comments Views
2006-02-24 Do schools kill creativity? Ken Robinson children, creativity, culture, dance, education, parenting, teaching 60 4553 47227110
2012-06-25 Your body language may shape who you are Amy Cuddy body language, brain, business, psychology, self, success 51 2290 43155405
2009-09-16 How great leaders inspire action Simon Sinek TEDx, business, entrepreneur, leadership, success 45 1930 34309432
2010-06-05 The power of vulnerability Brené Brown TEDx, communication, culture, depression, fear, mental health, psychology, self, social change 52 1927 31168150
2009-02-05 10 things you didn’t know about orgasm Mary Roach books, culture, history, humor, science, sex, writing 37 354 22270883
2013-06-09 How to speak so that people want to listen Julian Treasure culture, sound, speech 45 297 21594632
2008-02-26 My stroke of insight Jill Bolte Taylor biology, brain, consciousness, global issues, illness, science 49 2877 21190883
2006-02-01 Why we do what we do Tony Robbins business, culture, entertainment, goal-setting, motivation, potential, psychology 36 672 20685401
2015-12-07 This is what happens when you reply to spam email James Veitch comedy, communication, curiosity, humor, technology 43 150 20475972
2012-10-26 Looks aren’t everything. Believe me, I’m a model. Cameron Russell TEDx, beauty, culture, fashion, photography 43 846 19787465

Duration of Video vs. Viewership

The reason for using a scatter plot for this visualization was to determine if there is a relationship between the length of the video and the number of views it receives. Our question of interest was Do longer or shorter ted talks receive more views?

A smoothed line was added to more vividly show any correlations that might be present. The chart shows a few things. First, videos longer than 37 minutes did not receive more than 10,000,000 views which may suggest that very long videos are not captivating viewers. Additionally, the smoothed line is nearly horizontal with one noticeable peak at around 17-20 minutes so this could be the ideal video length for viewers in terms of their attention span. Generally, the videos were less than 25 minutes which is evident through the density of the points.

Distribution of Views by Year

The next chart we made was designed to answer the question of whether the year the talk was made had any impact on the number of views it received. The use of the box and whisker chart was used to show to show multiple distributions of all of the years in a way that allowed a quick comparison. The chart did not appear to reveal any significant differences between the years and the number of views, however, the distribution does appear to get slightly tighter as time went on. There were no obvious changes over time.

Ted Talk Ratings

Viewers have the ability to choose up to three adjectives from a list when they rate videos on TED’s website. The following chart explores how often users choose each adjective when leaving a rating. It also explores the popularity of ‘positive’ vs. ‘negative’ adjectives in ratings.

The chart reveals the most popular adjective chosen by users was “Inspiring” while the least popular was “Confusing”. Of the positive ratings, “Jaw-dropping” was the least popular. Of the negative ratings, “OK” was the most popular. In general, positive ratings were chosen more frequently than negative ratings. This could be partially due to the fact that TED offers less options for negative ratings than positive.